Imagine this scenario. You’re at the gym with your good friend, and you wince as you get up from a particularly gnarly stretch. Grabbing your back, your friend tells you, “You should see my chiropractor. She’s great.”

Of course, your friend hasn’t captured this hapless medical professional and stored her in the attic, just in case. But the language around who we trust with our business is that of ownership.

If you've stepped outside since October, it's beginning to feel a lot like Christmas.

What that actually means to you is as various as people in general. It could mean dragging plastic trees around the house; spending up big and forgetting it until your statement arrives; or you could be of a faith that only observes this bizarre ritual at a distance.

The language of Christmas - and likewise the language of anti-consumerist sentiments in opposition to it - are quite similar. They both try to persuade people into adopting a tradition that only dates back a couple of generations. Christmas as the gift-swapping, Turkey-engorged ritual we observe every 25th of December is as "made up" as Halloween; though detractors of the former will happily embrace the latter.

Many "traditions" are what we'd refer to today as "viral marketing campaigns"; the DeBeers diamond cartel insisting men save up at least 'three months salary' to buy their fiance an engagement ring with a diamond encrusted on top. That was dreamed up by the N.W. Ayer ad agency in the 1900s, to prop up what was once an abundant and intrinsically worthless gemstone.

We as humans (seem to) need ritual, repetition. It feels safe, and it feels predictable. If we arrived home after work each night and our keys worked one time in ten, we'd feel pretty out of sorts. Marketing and advertising around Christmas often depicts the familiar and cozy - even though a snow-driven Christmas is largely a product of the American imagination. Our drink containers, wrapping paper - even Christmas crackers - all show us images of Snowmen, candy canes, and hot cups of cocoa. All this in the middle of blazing summer, on a continent far removed from the frosted-over driveways of Europe or the United States.

Even as absurd as it sounds, this holiday has near universal support. Is that a good thing? Like most decisions we make in life, that's up to us and us alone. It's a weird one, when you think about it!

Dear Diary, I feel a bit nervous telling everyone about writing in you. What if they laugh at me? What if they think I’m being precious? Worst of all, what if they ignore me?!

Well, at least I got it out there. I tried my best. That’s all that matters.

Journalling is a time-honoured tradition. So many people that shaped the world jotted down their thoughts for the day, every day (or close enough to it.): Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Alexis de Toqueville, George S. Patton, Charles Darwin, Thomas Edison, George Lucas, Alfred Deakin, Teddy Roosevelt. That’s some great company, there. Research even tells us that outstanding leadership requires insight, and writing a journal can help achieve that.

That’s not to say journalling will spur you to instant success, of course. But it does give you pause to reflect, analyse, and process where you are and where you’d like to go.

When I first started out in journalism, my first ever piece was published in Buzz Magazine, the "biggest" street press in South-East Australia (it asked you to take out a ruler and measure.) I remember holding it in my hands, proud as a father taking home his newborn. Of course, as time marched on, the afterglow of publication dimmed. (When you're an editor, you sell the dark lightbulb for ad space.)

I'm chuffed to say I experienced it again over the weekend, as Pascall published a social post I helped create (the post ideas and action copy) for their Better Together campaign. It was a lot of fun to make with the entire Online Circle Digital team - I'm so grateful for my time there and how it turned out! See it below:

I went to university. I studied what would be termed a “liberal arts” degree by the American definition. When I graduated, I had exactly zero marketable skills. Until the internet thinkpiece revolution happened.

Back in the early 2000s when apps, video, and “content” in general got a “New Media” tag, thinkpieces were the exclusive province of the magazine. They soon found their way to the internet. We’ve dedicated entire platforms to the thinkpiece: Medium, Vox, and Australia’s own Junkee comes to mind.

When I began my own journalism career, the thinkpiece was the easiest piece of copy I could pitch and write. It required no research, little in the way of fieldwork, and I could knock it out over coffee and an afternoon. A thinkpiece requires a thesis, a vigorous defence of said thesis, a bit of pre-emptive rebuttal, and a (hopefully) thought-provoking conclusion. 99% of such pieces are pretentious, self-unaware, and full of cultural markers demonstrating the author’s position as a “cultural interlocutor.” My biggest criticism of self-declared “pop culture critics” is they call it a real job with a straight face. But they do have a function. They are the unacknowledged marketing conduit through which “highbrow” culture circulates.

The quest for organic, i.e., unpaid reach and engagement among marketers is endless. How does one market to a well off demographic, trained in the black arts of advertising and marketing, and emerge on the other side as a squeaky-clean, “authentic” expression for little to no outlay? You market to the thinkpiece crowd, of course.

As of writing, the thinkpieces on American rapper Childish Gambino (aka actor Donald Glover) new video for This Is America, number in the dozens; and that’s just page one of Google search results. The Atlantic, TIME, High Snobiety, AdAge, Rolling Stone, Vulture, and even the conservative National Review have all penned pieces in response to the violent, symbol-laden video. Their interpretations don’t even have to be correct, thanks to a liberal arts theory called “Death of The Author.” That is, a creator’s intentions should have no bearing on its final meaning. Even if Glover gives a definitive explanation, it won’t invalidate these competing viewpoints. Pretty neat, huh?

I KNOW WHAT YOU MIGHT ALREADY KNOW

Even still, do we need these people to tell us what it all means? Of course we don’t. But savvy marketers are in silent league with these haughty writers; give them fodder to write about, and they justify their own existence. Academia confers “high art” upon “pop art” through intense critical study; the thinkpiece does the same, in a compressed way.

McLuhan said that the medium is the message, and the message is buy this record, or at least consume this content. After the honeyed glow of the late 60s and early 70s “counterculture” wore off, sociologists Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter in their 2004 book TheRebel Sell declared it a “pseudo-rebellion.” The gospel of sexual liberation and generational identity became a “smug ritual.” This is what we’d now term “virtue signalling”; expressing a generic viewpoint to gain acceptance with a certain crowd.

It makes sense to produce “thinkpiece” inspiring content. It has to appear to have some deep underlying message which these “cultural interlocutors” can ferret out with their critical theory skills. Whether it has a message or not is beside the point. When it comes to creating content, there is no non-commercial part of it, especially for rappers riding on big investments in their craft.

The least cynical but most ironic part of marketing in the 21st century, seems to me the “thinkpiece”. What’s your interpretation?

When the railroad and the automobile came on the scene, those who wanted could still travel by horseback. But now there is no choice. A businessman cannot acquire a computer just because he likes progress. The computer brings a whole system with it…the technical system has become strongly integrated…offices, means of distribution, personnel must all be adapted to it. - Jacques Ellul, The Technological Bluff

If you've flicked through Instagram, Facebook, or Snapchat over the last 48 hours you've likely seen users flocking to a new social medium called Vero. Vero's tag is "true social," which Forbes says enables one to "share what you want to share with who you want to share it with, unencumbered by the crush of third party posts that show up with ever-increasing frequency in other social networks."

This is a boon to brands and advertisers (some of which are bedroom guitarists showing off mediocre covers on Instagram) - no algorithm? No advertising? It sounds like a dream come true.

The media scholar in me says - not so fast. As a student of Neil Postman, media ecology, and everything else that goes with it, my mind tends to this maxim by the late, great Professor:

"New technology is a kind of Faustian bargain. It always gives us something, but it always takes away something important. That’s true of the alphabet, and the printing press, and telegraph, right up through the computer."

So what makes Vero so different? Why could it prevail over other networks such as the now defunct App.net, Mastodon, and even Google+, which had the search behemoth behind it despite dismal take up?

Well, right now, we have a pronounced network effect. This is the increased perception of usefulness due to a rapid surge of new subscribers. The more people seen to use it, the more useful it looks, and eventually becomes.

But success is not assured. As you can see, Twitter and Facebook, for example, were true "new" technologies. They were as revolutionary to media as a culture as the printing press or television. They both had a transformative effect.

Twenty years ago, we could not conceive of a public official communicating directly with his or her constituencies in near-real time, using a common platform. I am of course talking about the rise of Presidents Obama and Trump using Twitter.

Whether the network effect peaks and deflates, much like the Pokemon Go phenomenon (how many tweens do you see in parks catching electronic monsters these days?), remains to be seen. This is the major stumbling block: Vero is not offering an automobile in the age of horseback. They are just offering an alternative automobile, a Chevrolet Series C Classic to Ford's Model T.

Vero offers many of the same features Google+ did when introduced in June 2011. You can share with pre-defined circles of friends, share limitless text, links, images, and video, and also does not rank content according to algorithms or advertising. Even though G+ is baked into every Google account on the planet (boasting 540 million monthly active users at one point) those users only engaged with it for 3-7 minutes on average, compared to 7.5 hours for Facebook.

Enter Mephistopheles

Of course, there's a dark side - the fine print. Uploading content to Vero grants them a:

Which basically hands over your moral and copyrights over to the service. Forever. It still affords effortless social interaction (like Facebook) but takes away the nuance and depth of face-to-face communication (also like Facebook.)

Vero's success will owe more to human behaviour than any other media theory I could reference: habit. Social media isn't just where everyone "is", it's also a daily (hourly?) ritual giving us a little rush of dopamine. If likes and strokes (in the Eric Berne sense of the word) are few and far between on Vero, people will cling to what they know.

What do you think? Will Vero take off, or will it too end up a "digital ghost town" like so many "Facebook-killers" that have passed before it?

More on the network effect, by TechAltar

Some of us get text messages that are very serious business. Or in text speak, srs bsns.

But what makes a text go from light-hearted banter into draft UN Resolution? It would seem, the absence or presence of punctuation, such as full stops.

This phenomenon is called code-switching, the "practice of alternating between two or more languages or varieties of language in conversation."

Those of us with parents or grandparents born overseas will have seen this in action many times before. My Baba was notorious for speaking "Maso-lish", a mashup of Macedonian and English. My favourite was "Don't be a boudala," which means don't be an idiot. It would seem I was called that rather often. (Another favourite was "Otfori na computer", or "open the computer.") This isn't limited to multi-lingual people, however. We all do it.

Code-switching is almost seamless in terms of how we interpret language, and is controlled by our amygdala (lizard brains.). However when we expect short text messages or instant messages such as those over WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger, adding full stops, capital letters, etc. may break that implied code.

Many of us tend to believe a code-switch from informal (text speak) to formal language indicates a seriousness or gravitas to a conversation. Some of us just refuse to code-switch, employing the same tone and style across all mediums.

This requires some brainpower in realising your conversation partner isn't upset, being sarcastic, or whatever. Of course, much of what we mean when we type is lost, as we don't have visual and auditory cues such as facial expression, body language, and tonality. When in doubt, we can always Skype someone!

One of my favourite TV shows is Star Trek. My favourite spin-off is Deep Space Nine. My least favourite is Voyager. Let me tell you a story about both of these shows. (Be prepared for a journey through time and space until we land back on Planet Earth!)

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine was a bold effort in television at the time. (Not as bold as its rival Babylon 5, but that’s another story.) This was a science fiction show using their abundant technology to stay still. Star Trek was, and is, about exploring strange new worlds. Deep Space Nine was set on a space station. Things interacted with it, not the other way around.

Star Trek: Voyager put a twist on what had come before, however. The premise of “exploring strange new worlds” was still the pillar of the show. However, this time the crew of the titular USS Voyager finds themselves stranded in the Delta Quadrant, 70.000 light years from Earth. Even with the futuristic faster-than-light tech that Star Trek relies on for storytelling, this means a 75-year journey back.

During season two of their epic seven-season run, Deep Space Nine began serialising their stories. They introduced a chilling antagonist in the Dominion, bent on destroying the peaceful Federation and her allies. For a show that was set on a space station, their adventures and conflicts took place between people and tough moral situations. This was an age where binge watching and catch-ups weren’t an option (1993-1999). If you missed a week, you missed a vital part. The final season wrapped up narrative threads artfully set up in the preceding five seasons.

Voyager was the opposite. In comparison, Voyager was a cartoon. Anything that blew up the ship, imperilled the crew, or caused mischief in the Holodeck reset the next week. Voyager was indestructible, from a narrative point of view.

Deep Space Nine was created with no endgame in mind. Voyager had an endgame – get back to Earth. In fact, production staff titled the last episode Endgame. As predicted, they returned to Earth. They had to, right?

So what does this have to do with writing and communication?

Back To Earth - Communication with Purpose

Screenwriting is a form of communication – to directors, actors, prop masters, designers, costumers and so on. So is your writing – to managers, customers, distributors, suppliers, and so on.

Every piece of writing you set to create must have an endgame. There has to be a reason for it, and a set of outcomes you want to achieve. If you lose sight of that endgame, people will tell. It’s why fans pilloried Voyager at the time (and still do to this day.)

Some pieces of writing such as an annual report or a request for comment have an endgame baked into it. A request for comment is defined by its title - it’s asking for requests for comment! But the endgame is not enough. It has to reach out and touch someone. This is the basis for all types of writing. Sharing our wants, needs, and experience using the medium of words.

Connecting With Humanity - Communication with Passion

Once you’ve established an endgame, Deep Space Nine, unlike Voyager, had vulnerability. This vulnerability served a purpose. If your message has no heart, it is pushing uphill to connect with people. If you write without exposing yourself as a vulnerable individual with conflicts and feelings of your own, it falls flat.

Vulnerability is how we connect with readers - the Ancient Greeks called it “pathos”, a critical part of rhetoric, or the art of persuasion. You can connect with readers in a book, an essay, or even a simple email. Vulnerability expert, author, and TED sensation Dr. Brene Brown says vulnerability is the beginning of courage, and courage helps us belong in the world. She says:

“Because true belonging only happens when we present our authentic, imperfect selves to the world, our sense of belonging can never be greater than our level of self-acceptance.”

Perennial business cliche (and he’s a cliche for 74.8 billion reasons) and Berkshire Hathaway founder Warren Buffett always has an endgame and a vulnerability. As he says himself:

“Whenever I sit down to write the annual report, I pretend I am writing it to one of my sisters. Though highly intelligent, they are not experts on accounting or finance. They will understand plain English, but jargon may puzzle them. My goal is simply to give the information I would wish them to supply me if our positions are reversed. To succeed, I don’t need to be Shakespeare; I must have a sincere desire to inform.”

When you reveal yourself as a real person through your writing, you make every instalment an unmissable piece of your story. It must have passion, and it must have purpose.

In the writing game, I feel that you need to consume more than you produce. That is, writers should really read more than they write. Busy lifestyles command more of our time in ever thinning slices, but reading should be a top priority for anyone who communicates in a professional setting. How you divide that time is up to you: some prefer magazines, others prefer non-fiction. I maintain that a variety of styles and sources is best for a well-rounded “education” on writing. I think reading deeply is as important as reading widely. The path to mastery is not one, but many. I try to read the most pertinent in my collection at least once a year, to remind myself of certain facts and certain perspectives.

Non-fiction

Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman

I’ve mentioned this book on the blog before, but it’s more relevant than ever. Those scratching their heads at how the US populace could elect a Reality TV president, this book written 30 years prior gives insight other commentators merely skirt around. I mean, we already had the Reality TV war (Iraq) and the Reality TV terror attack (September 11), was a Reality TV leader of the free world that far-fetched? Postman shows us a media culture obsessed with “feel-good” over “facts,” and the biases of our mediums that conspire to keep it that way.

Language in Thought and Action by Samuel I. Hayakawa

The “popular” text on General Semantics and language studies, a must for those who want to discover their own semantic biases and the biases of others. It too delves into logic games, multi-valued orientations vs. two-valued “absolutisms”, poetry and the advertiser, what words really “mean”, and much more. An essential book for those working in communications.

Fiction

Nineteen-Eighty Four by George Orwell

This book was one of the first I’d read in high school and has stuck with me ever since. I think I’m attracted to the linguistic element of the book, Newspeak, and the narrowing of our experience as Big Brother eliminates complex ideas. “You don't grasp the beauty of the destruction of words,” says Parsons, our protagonist Winston Smith’s co-worker in the Ministry of Truth. Reading it sends a chill down my spine each time. Compare “Ministry of Truth” to “Social Justice” or “Fake news.”

Ubik by Philip K. Dick

One of the first ever books I’d read of Philip K. Dick, and one that demonstrates the power of words to craft an alternate reality. The mention or non-mention of certain phrases and passages turns a world on our head, as does the revelation and suppression of certain bits of information. It’s a philosophical tome, a book about running out of time, and much more.

John, a man in his late 20s, well-educated, and from a loving family home is sitting across from two executives in a modern, fishbowl-style boardroom. We hear the faint murmur of keyboards clacking, phones warbling and footsteps on carpet. John has hung up his suit jacket on his chair. Amanda is looking through his crisp white resume, scribbling notes and lines on it every so often. Peter, who is wearing an open collar chequer shirt, has his hands clasped in front of him on the oak table. John is angling to be their next communications manager.

John feels that the interview is going well. He’s answered all their questions without so much as a stumble, and the vibe in the room is upbeat, positive. He has a strong rapport with both Amanda and Peter, and they seem to be warm to him.

“So,” Peter says, “Do you have anything you want to ask us?” Amanda places the resume on the table and meets John’s gaze.

The famous scene in Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Cameron stares at details and ends up seeing nothing.

“Tell me all the details!” is a well-worn piece of dialogue from romcoms and sitcoms – usually as two women in pyjamas hold wine and sit down on a couch. Being the word nerd that I am, I often wonder – what if the storyteller took what she said literally?

The sometimes physicist, sometimes wizard Robert Anton Wilson once wrote that creating a map of a territory – let’s say my hometown of Melbourne – with perfect detail would require a map so large it would be identical to Melbourne itself. It would contain trillions of moving parts, right down to those fast food wrappers blowing about Flinders Street Station. “Perfect detail” is impossible, for our brains cannot comprehend it.

An incomplete, but still useful, map.

So, communication is imperfect and subject to distortion on the way from sender to receiver. Many businesses bog themselves down in the detail, believing that more detail is better. Heaping more “detail” on with words about your product or service increases the chance of distortion. So the model you present to the world is now:

Not representative of the whole, and;

Possibly incorrect once it reaches the person you’re showing it to.

Politics wonks bury themselves in the detail, sometimes reams and reams of it. Apathetic types may bemoan the “soundbite” culture of politics, but politicians are savvy enough to realise detail is unimportant, because detail is incomprehensible. Elections are won and lost on getting the amount of detail wrong. Just look at former Liberal opposition leader Dr. John Hewson lose the 1993 “unlosable” Federal Election getting bogged down in – you guessed it, detail.

How much detail is enough?

So how much detail is enough? Why is detail a bad thing? Of course, it’s neither good nor bad, but most effective when applied with forethought. For a business, too much detail can end up dead on arrival to your intended audience (which is another amorphous blob that contains too much individual elements to get right.) So whatever you end up communicating is incomplete, but useful.

Take my 1:1 map example. A 1:1 map doesn’t help me navigate around Melbourne. However remove most of the detail, shrink it down into a two-dimensional representation, and I can still make my way from Flinders St. to the Town Hall up Swanston in the form of a map. The connection between map and territory is more useful, even with many details left out.

For some, the more you look the less you see. Do you ever feel frustrated by detail?

First off, thanks to all who attended my BBN Seminar at Sandringham Yacht Club on Monday, 9 May. I very much appreciated it! One of the more resonant pieces from my talk was about distance and wordiness. Wordiness - adding too many words for the sake of adding words - creates more distance between yourself and your audience.

The thing about wordiness is this: it creates more flaming hoops to jump through for your reader. If your reader has to sit there, his or her eyes scanning the page waiting for crucial information to leap out at them, they will eventually give up. If people can’t understand the value of your product or service, it may as well have no value.

I had a client that was all into arts and crafts – her business was making custom greeting cards, candles, gifts, that sort of thing. She knew her website content wasn’t working, so I looked through it. Her writing seemed stilted and impenetrable. I didn’t understand what she was selling or why she was selling it. As part of my usual process, I conduct an interview with my clients to get information on the business. It allows me to get to know who they are as people, so I can better express their unique point of view. The person I talked to was such a departure from the “person” on the website, I was almost beside myself. Jamie, or Freckles as her friends call her, was colourful, bubbly, friendly and her website was grey, static, lifeless. It didn’t make sense!

Freckles didn’t play to Freckle’s strengths. Freckles made a craft corner in her bedroom into a hobby business, which is now her full time business. She had that playful, youthful energy about her, and it wasn’t anywhere on the website. That’s because her copy didn’t cut to the core of what Freckles was about – making custom candles and gifts for you is your gift to her. It didn’t come through because there were just too many wrong words on the page for people to get a sense of her.

A lot of writing is cutting. Stephen King said it best – writing (or any creative endeavour) is all about “murdering your darlings” – cutting the unneeded words, sentences, paragraphs. However, the process of writing as writing isn’t thought about as talking onto a page. That’s kind of what it is – we’re substituting our ears for our eyes. What we can't hear we see, and what we're told to see, we imagine. We want to lead our reader down a path toward understanding, familiarity and above all, trust.

It works with business, it works with dating, it works with any human interaction - if you're writing, just be yourself first! It closes your "credibility gap" from page to person.

Well, not quite. But the great friends at Bizividz recorded a great promo video for my upcoming seminar on Monday, 9 May at Sandringham Yacht Club. Click here to register!

To talk copywriting (accounting...website development and everything else) you're always welcome to come along to one of Bayside Business Network's networking nights at the beautiful Royal Melbourne Golf Club in Sandringham. It's on Wednesday, the 4th of May. Click here for more information!

What’s the secret to a great turn of phrase? Can you learn to think different? Or can you Just do it? Can a simple clutch of words turn a brand from meh into I’m Lovin’ It?

Turning Phrases, Turning Heads takes the mystery out of words – business’ most powerful ally and most fearsome foe. Learn simple ways to turn drab prose into clear, concise and dynamic writing. Enhance your business by mastering the basics of rhetoric, persuasion and cutting through to customers (well, metaphorically of course.) Spur your thoughts into intention, your intention into action and your action into success. (I’ll also teach you the term for that rhetorical turn of phrase, too!) Learn the best tips for keeping people on your site, buying from you and coming back for more.

Lapsed writers, nervous scribblers and maths nerds all – you too can coin masterful phrases and turn heads in this fun, engaging and enlightening seminar!

Star Wars: The Force Awakens drowned us this summer, with merchandising ranging from mascara to oranges on store shelves. Once I saw the new film, I wanted to see the original theatrical versions, undiluted by George Lucas’ meddling. Lucasfilm insists they no longer exist. Of course, legions of fans took it upon themselves to reconstruct the films using a variety of sources. The most controversial change in the first film takes place in the Mos Eisley cantina scene. (spoiler alert – but really, you should’ve seen Star Wars by now!) Green gilled and bug-eyed Greedo corners smuggler Han Solo. Han’s a marked man and Greedo’s itching to collect. In the original version, (after stalling and Han drawing his blaster) Han shoots Greedo “in cold blood.” Here’s what the shooting script says:

“Suddenly the slimy alien disappears in a blinding flash of light.
Han pulls his smoking gun from beneath the table as the other patrons look on in bemused amazement.”

Later revisions show Greedo shooting first, then Han and Greedo shooting at the same time. “So what?” you might think. This visually insignificant change is one that contains multitudes.

It’s supposed to inform viewers that Solo isn’t so trustworthy. Ben and Luke have put in their lot with this low-life braggart. We’re supposed to feel uneasy about this hasty alliance. It changes the tenor of the film. Han could have sold Ben and Luke if captured by the Imperials, left them for dead at any time, etc.

Another far more tragic example of subtle changes having long reaching effects was during the last gasp of World War II. Japan, threatened by invasion from the United States and fast running out of resources, was determined to fight until the last man. The “Big Three” (United Kingdom, Soviet Union and the US) issued an ultimatum for surrender to the Japanese. The Japanese responded in the negative, but suffered from mistranslation. A word – mokusatsu – has two meanings in Japanese. The first being “ignore” and the other, “refrain from comment.” It was the difference between “let us think about it” and “We refuse!” If the message was translated as “no comment,” the Japanese and US may have arrived at a surrender deal, preventing the twin atomic horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This misinterpretation struck consequences far beyond the imaginations of its writers and readers.

It’s a chilling lesson for clarity and precision in communication. We may think that subtle differences make no difference, although we're proven wrong time and time again. If you believe that words are your ally, do – keep in mind words might turn on you without provocation. Remember always: "Expect to misunderstand and expect to be misunderstood."

A month or so ago, I was humbled to be a guest on Active Elements RadioThe Pointy End podcast, hosted by Dr. Leslie Fisher. Dr. Fisher is a good friend and colleague of mine, and we've had many long conversations about a variety of topics during our meetings at the NAB Village. The Pointy End is his podcast series looking at "the pointy end" of what people in small business do, in probing and insightful detail. It's a relaxed but no less informative talk...I hope!

It was a great privilege to guest "star" on the podcast, which you can hear above. We talked about the "pointy end" of copywriting, its relation to journalism and media culture as a whole. About 40 minutes - let me know your thoughts in the comments!

I've always wanted to say I write "award-winning" copy. Now I can! I've won the 2015 APAC Insider Business Award for Best Copywriting in Melbourne!

According to the mag, "It is the job of the 2015 APAC Insider Business Awards to seek out the very best firms, departments, individuals and initiatives from across the Asia Pacific region and to reward their innovation, client care and, it goes without saying, stellar performance over the past 12 months.

"[APAC Insider] takes rewarding the top performers in this region very seriously and each award programme and category has been meticulously tailored to provide a comprehensive overview of the very best each market, industry and sector has to offer."